Monday, 15 June 2015

President Buhari Orders Release Of $21 Million To Fight Boko Haram

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered the immediate release
of $21 million (4.2 billion naira) to the coalition forces fighting
Boko Haram. Buhari said Sunday the large sum of money will be released
within a week to the Multinational Joint Task Force, which comprises
troops from Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon, according to local media
reports.

Nigeria had pledged a total of $100 million (19.9 billion naira) to
fight the militant group. Boko Haram’s Islamist insurgency has plagued
northern Nigeria for the past six years. More than 15,000 people have
died, and nearly 1.5 million others have been displaced in Nigeria since
2009. Buhari said it’s time to put an end to Boko Haram and other
regional crises within the next five years, Nigerian newspaper Premium Times reported.

“Our continent is inundated with conflicts of diverse forms. They
include the crisis in Burkina Faso, Mali, Libya, Central African
Republic, South Sudan and more recently in Burundi,” Buhari said while
chairing the Peace Security Council meeting at the ongoing 25th African
Union summit in Johannesburg. “As you are aware in 2013 during our
50th anniversary celebration of our union, we as African leaders
committed ourselves to the objective of silencing the local guns in
Africa by 2020.”

The Nigerian president, who was inaugurated last month, also called
on fellow African leaders at the summit to stop “bickering among
themselves” and put the interest of their countries and people above
their own. Buhari lamented the fighting in South Sudan,
a young nation that plunged into crisis in 2013, when President Salva
Kiir sacked his deputy Riek Machar, as well as the situation in Burundi, where unrest and instability erupted amid President Pierre Nkurunziza’s push for re-election.

“We must change the face of Africa, we must give hope to the
hopeless,” Buhari said Sunday. “The time to do so is now as we look
forward to the much awaited 2020 to deliver a continent that is at peace
with itself, prosperous, a global partner and a democratic showcase.”